Space exploration?

Are you kidding me? You claim that it is true that truth is a false idea. How can that statement be true if truth is a false idea? How can anything be false if nothing is true? Do you really not see the contradictions that are spewing of your mouth? Here's something for you to remember: as soon as you've arrived at a contradiction in what you are saying ("it's true that nothing is true" or something similar) it means you've made a mistake. You would do well not to post your mistakes...

Something cannot be "true to you" because the truth is objective. It exists outside of, and despite, whatever you may believe. For example: if somebody thought that the Earth was flat, it would still not be flat. Get it? Or is that too difficult for you to comprehend?

Are you really this stupid??

you know what? you're always right. i hereby declare my official break with everything i've said, and my total allegiance to billjism.

You make an unfunny joke because you can't defend you're stupid postmodernism. How clever you are...

you can't upend your postmortem ism

Another elusive non-response from the village idiot of libcom.org

While the dispossesed is awesome i do suspect that sheveks theory is little more than the standard warpdrive/wormhole bumph given a hard science fiction background. Although the bit at the party where he explains it all is pretty credible

In terms of hard science fiction though its arguable that faster than light travel isn't entirely necessary, aftrall its logical to suggest that an object can continue to accelerate using gravity. solar flares, concussive force etc to nigh on the speed of light and that takes us five years odd to travel to the nearest star. However, in the centuries we've got till such journeys could ever be attempted medical science would no doubt be so far advanced that our lifespans would be many centuries if not many millenia long, thus what we now perceive as impossibly long journeys would not be seen as such by our ancestors. In short by looking at an interstellar journey as being impossible due to the timescale involved , we are looking at interstellar journeys in the same way as a mayfly might look at a round the world cruise.
Admittedly this would in many cases make for somewhat slow moving science fiction plots and thus framing space travel in a time frame we can currently understand kinda makes more sense in a lot of cases.

You're responding to something that I didn't say. Where did I give you a choice between technologically backward socialism or a technologically progressive capitalism?

The only choice I ever gave was: communism without space travel or capitalism with it? I think the answer is pretty obvious. I never once stated that a post-revolutionary society wouldn't have space travel. I personally see no reason why not. There are plenty of people interested in this field, and most people probably wouldn't make going to work making shuttles or what have you for a couple days a week. The point was that there is no answer to this question right now. It will have to be decided upon AFTER capitalism is abolished. Present-day radicals don't get to decide whether or not we will have space travel. That includes the people here and at Infoshop. I see no real problem in discussing it but to say "There will be space travel - don't worry, Zazaban!" or "Sorry, Zazaban, communism precludes going to space" are both incorrect. There may be space travel, and so obviously there may be none at all.

The entire point is that if someone is truly worried about anarchist/communist society not having space travel (which doesn't imply a technologically backward socialism -- all it implies is that the individuals in that society chose not to use their resources for space travel) then the critique of capitalism they have is missing something.

And to repeat something from earlier: if space travel is truly necessary for human survival than there is no real reason to think that anybody other than a few irrational whackjobs will be opposed to it.

Meh well i quite like imagining a utopian future, you know a world better than this one and all that malarkey, so i imagine space travel, massively extended human lifespans, a world where technology reduces our workload drastically and so on.

i wasn;t particularly implying that you were creating that dichotomy but the point is it does exist in a lot of peoples minds and it is or perhaps increasingly was a major facet of bourgeois ideology. So I think its necessary to bend the stick over the issue sometimes, certainly i've found so when freinds of mine have put their view of anarchism as being a bunch of people who want to live in trees.

I have to admit that I too am emotionally attracted to the idea of spaceflight (in English, that means that I'm a bit of a space geek as well!) but have no illusions about its connection with the military. Under the present system space flight with its military-derived hardware and technologies may very well be a way of getting rid of surplus capital in much the same way as war is. In time, capital's insatiable drive for unlimited expansion may very well lead to such activities as asteroid mining and readily exploitable colonies on other planets when the Eath becomes too small. The current high cost of launching (over and above the minimum energy requirements for such activities) is economic (that's a bit of a tautology, I know) - it is cheaper to build lots of rockets and throw the bits away each time than to develop fully reusable launch vehicles, and the stages that are discarded play much the same role as waste in any capitalist production process where that waste is unavoidable. Although the space race itself was the product of military and economic competition space exploration itself should not be dismissed as just that -it is an example of human creative potential access to which is denied to the rest of us. There are many ways to cheapen access to space- the space elevator, previously mentioned, where a cable is dropped down to the earth's surface from a satellite in geosynchronous orbit and a correspondingly long cable is extended in the opposite direction to balance the thing out is one of them, but requires materials technologies and techniques that are currently unavailable such as the ability to build a 24000 mile-long cable that will not break under its own weight! Solar energy could be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen for use as rocket propellant thus eliminating the use of fossil fuels to extract hydrogen from other fossil fuels with all the attendant environmental damage.
I just love the Roth SI article about extending the power of workers councils into space -it is called I think "The Conquest of Space in the Time of Power" and is available in the SI anthology. I do not know anything about the author although searching the Internet may prove useful .
On the politics of interstellar societies I would like to draw peoples attention to Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy and to his novel "The Stars Like Dust" which describes a future high- tech society with a social system that resembles mediaeval Europe or the Mongol Khanate of the Middle Ages. The hero Byron Farril is instrumental in bringing about the establishment of a more "normal" constitutional democracy. It is posssible to do resistant readings of "Foundation" in the sense that although plenty of popular uprisings are described none of them result in proletarian revolutions, so Asimov was implicitly aware of the power of mass revolt. It is far from certain that FTL travel, on which these novels rely is even possible.

How can you even think about space travel when people are starving?????? What the hell does space have to do with the working class?????????? Only middle class students/politicos with too much time on their hands can afford to sit around and talk about stuff that has nothing to do with factories!! Space travel is an abomination, a symbol of bourgeois arrogance! We will smash the space stations and lay waste to the launch pads in the revolution that is to come!!!!!

But seriously, this is an interesting topic. Is there any scientific consensus on the presence of inhabitable planets in this galaxy? A more scientifically literate friend of mine told me that these planets were likely to be too far away to actually reach, at least with our current technology.

Bourgeois parasite! You're first against the wall!

He's joking around, dude.

Yeah man I was being sarcastic. Sorry if it was in poor taste .

The second part of my post was serious though and I think it's a fascinating subject, not just space travel but future technological development i general as well. My brother has actually been telling me about transhumanism and I wonder if anyone has examined it through a revolutionary/communist lens.

To save making a new thread, can I ask what happened to Kino Fist?